Culling several shoots overnight: batch importing folders so the morning starts sorted

Some days you shoot one job. Other days you shoot four: a couple of dealer cars in the morning, a classic in the afternoon, a property on the way home. Each one is a card or a folder, and each one needs importing and culling before you can start the part that actually earns money.

The cull on any one of those folders might be quick. The cost is the babysitting — starting one, waiting, starting the next, remembering which you’ve done. That’s the part worth handing to the computer while you’re asleep. Most of what follows applies whatever software you use.

Why multiple shoots are slower than one big one

A single shoot of two thousand frames is one long job. Four shoots of five hundred frames are four short jobs with gaps between them, and the gaps are where the evening goes:

• Context switching. Every new folder means choosing settings again, checking it’s the right card, naming it.
• Waiting at the screen. You can’t walk away from an import that needs you to press the next button when it finishes.
• Mixed jobs need different treatment. A property shoot and a motorsport shoot shouldn’t be judged the same way, so they can’t just be thrown into one pile.

Batching fixes the first two and, done properly, respects the third.

Get the folders right first

Any batch process is only as good as what you feed it. Ten minutes of tidying at the end of the day saves a confused morning.

1. One folder per job. Not per card, per job. If a job spanned two cards, put both cards’ files in one folder (or two sub-folders inside one job folder). If one card held two jobs, split it.
2. Name folders by date and client. Something like 2026-10-31 Smith P1800. It sorts properly, and when the batch finishes you can tell at a glance which result belongs to whom.
3. Back up before you cull. Copy off the cards before anything else touches the files. A cull shouldn’t change originals, but the card is the only copy until you’ve made another. A backup routine that actually gets done.
4. Keep RAW and JPEG decisions consistent. If you shoot RAW+JPEG, decide whether you’re culling the pair or just the RAWs, and keep it the same for every folder in the batch.

Decide the keep rule per shoot, not per batch

The quiet mistake with batch culling is applying one rule to everything. A dealer car where the client wants twenty set angles is a different job from a trackday where you’re keeping one frame per pass. Before you queue anything, decide roughly how much of each shoot you expect to keep:

These aren’t figures to copy — your own past jobs are the best guide. Look at what you actually delivered from the last few of each type and set the rule from that.

Run it overnight, safely

Leaving a computer working unattended is simple, but there are a few things that reliably go wrong:

• Sleep. The most common failure. If the machine sleeps, the work pauses until it wakes, and nothing gets done overnight. On a Mac, turn off automatic sleep in System Settings (Battery or Energy, depending on the machine); on Windows 11, Settings → System → Power & battery → Screen and sleep, and set sleep to Never (Windows 10: System → Power & sleep). Keep a laptop plugged in with the lid open.
• Updates and restarts. Postpone system updates for the night. An operating-system restart at 3am will end any long job.
• External drives. If the folders are on an external drive, make sure it’s not set to sleep or eject, and isn’t on a hub that drops connection.
• Disk space. Check you have room for previews and any output before you go to bed, not after.
• One bad folder shouldn’t stop the rest. Whatever you use, check how it handles a failed folder — a corrupt file or an unplugged drive shouldn’t cost you the other three shoots.

The morning after

A batch cull is a first pass, not a delivery. The useful routine in the morning is short:

1. Check what failed, and why. Fix it (usually a missing drive or an odd file) and re-run it.
2. Review each shoot’s picks quickly. You’re checking the proposed keepers rather than starting from every frame. Swap anything you disagree with.
3. Deliver in order of urgency. The trackday drivers who want images today first; the property job with a Monday deadline after.

How this works in Vantage

Vantage is our app, and version 0.26.0 adds an Overnight batch tab to the New shoot screen for exactly this. It’s out on Mac now; Windows gets it in the next update. You add folders to a queue one by one, each with its own shoot type, an option to include sub-folders, and its own keep rule — keep roughly 10, 15, 25 or 40 percent, or keep everything scoring 60, 70 or 80 and above. Press Run overnight and it imports and culls each folder in turn, saving each as its own shoot.

A few details that matter when nobody’s watching: a folder that fails is recorded with the reason and the rest carry on, with a Retry failed button for the morning. You can add a folder while it’s running, or ask it to stop after the current folder. If Vantage is closed mid-run, the queue is still there when you reopen it, and the interrupted folder can be retried. It won’t install an app update while a batch is running, so an update can’t restart it halfway through.